This definitive biography of Kahlil Gibran - author of The Prophet - traces the phenomenon of a first-generation immigrant succeeding in twentieth-century American arts and letters.

Drawing upon never-before published letters and documents, the authors describe Gibran's boyhood in Lebanon, his family's impoverished years in turn-of-the-century Boston, and his eventual friendship with that city's intellectual elite. This authorized biography will make obsolete all previous accounts and will become the definitive study of this extraordinary and well-loved writer.